~ Researching Russell Co, Kentucky

Category Archives: PERSI

This week, I’ve been focusing on use the PERSI search found on Findmypast.com. If you’ve been following along and making your list, you probably have quite a number of articles that you’d like to see! So how can you see these articles?

If you live near Fort Wayne, Indiana, you can visit the Allen County Public Library and look up each article yourself. (If you decide to go this route, let me know and we can meet up!) The library has an entire wall of newsletters in addition to bound books of newsletters which you can find within the books from the county.

You can order the articles from the library. The order form allows for up to 6 articles. The fee is $7.50 per order form plus 20 cents per page copied – to be billed to you. Let’s assume you want 6 articles and each one takes 1 page to copy (which may not be enough pages). $7.50 plus $1.20 for copies – $8.70. Not too bad. If you only want 1 article – $7.50 plus $0.20 = $8.70, so that might be a little steep for a one page (or 1 paragraph) article. And obviously, if your list is as long as my list…that’s going to run into some serious money!

If you happen to be lucky enough to see a camera icon after your article, that means that the article has been digitized and you can view it online. This does require having a subscription to Findmypast. What if you don’t currently have a subscription?

See if your library has access to the library version of the site.

If you have a small list of articles, you might be tempted to consider some PayAsYouGo credits to view the specific articles. 60 credits cost $10.95 and are good for 90 days. But note: a 1 month “Starter” subscription which includes seeing the digital articles, is only $9.95, so I’d definitely take that route over PayAsYouGo, especially if you only plan to use the site for PERSI.

You can also use PayAsYouGo credits to see the “transcriptions” – which every article has. This site’s definition of “transcription” is different from mine. What you get is a page of article information such as Article Title, Periodical Name, Volume/Issue/Date, Call Number, Publisher, etc. If you don’t see a camera icon, you won’t see the actual article. I don’t believe that is worth the cost. The only information that I felt was worth noting in the transcription that wasn’t on the search results page was the call number – something that I can find from the library website.

If you do have a Findmypast account and an article has a camera icon, you can click on it to see the digital version of the periodical. From the image, there is a download option in the lower right corner, but it only downloads the page you are looking at. You will have to click through the periodical to reach the page that your article is found on and download each page individually.

What if you don’t see any camera icons and you can’t afford to travel to Fort Wayne or to order all of the articles? Then turn to WorldCat.org.

Enter the name of the publication or historical society in the search box. If you get a long list, add a check mark in the “Journal/Magazine” option on the left. Be sure to confirm that you are looking at the correct listing by checking the publisher.

Scroll down just a bit to the section titled “Find a copy in the library”. You might just get lucky and find that a library closer to you has a copy as well! Will they have every issue? That might be worth an email to double check before making a trip.

This week’s Snack was to complete 1 specific PERSI search on the Findmypast website. I thought about making additional searches as future Snacks, but decided to keep them all together so that a researcher can have all information possible before making a copy request or traveling to a library to find articles.

In Snack #5, we entered our County and State in the search box, but the PERSI team doesn’t know your County the way that you do. This time, enter the name of a town in the “Optional Keywords” box and you are likely to see articles you didn’t see in the County search. If the town name is a common one, add your State to the filter as well. This search works best for smaller towns. When I entered “Louisville” into the “Optional Keywords” box, I got over 10,000 hits. When I tried “Creelsboro” (a small town in Russell County), I got 9 results, 2 of which had not been tagged with the County name.

If you get a decent number of results, go ahead and copy and paste them all into your tracking sheets. If you complete a sort to make the article titles alphabetical, it will be easy to spot duplicates.

Note – if you try to enter a town name in the “Town/City” box and you don’t get a pop-up suggestion, then you haven’t really added that filter. That’s why I suggest using the “Optional Keywords” box instead.

From the search page – enter your County in the “Publisher” box. Take a look at the choices that appear in the pop-up menu. Select the Genealogical/Historical Society you are interested in and click “Search Periodical Source Index” at the bottom of the filter box.

You will get a list of all of the articles published by that group. But you might be surprised to find several different publications. Be sure to click on the numbered buttons at the bottom. If you’d like an example, try putting “Wayne County Historical Society” in the “Publisher” box. You will not only see “Wayne County Historical Society” but you will also see “Overview”, “Wayne County Historian”, “Wayne County Historical Society and the Old Jail Museum”. You might want to start a list.

If there are multiple publications, you can go back to the main search page and enter the name of one publication in the “Periodical” box. When you complete the search, you will get a list of every article published in that Periodical. In our original search, you were seeing every article from that publisher.

Do you see items you’d like to explore further for a specific ancestor? Add that article to that ancestor’s Research Plan!

Start a new search. Click on the “Browse Periodicals” link and enter your State in the search box.

See anything you never would have thought to look for?

Put a check mark in front of one of the periodicals and click “Apply Filter”. This will take you back to the search page with your periodical added as a filter. Click “Search Periodical Source Index” at the bottom of the search area and you will get a list of every article in that periodical.

Try to add multiple filters to narrow down your list. The one box that I personally find a little irritating is the “Subject” box. Let’s say I only want to see articles about the Military from my County. If I type “Military” in the subject line, I get multiple suggestions in the pop-up such as “Biography,Cemeteries,History,Military Records,Surname”. There does not appear to be an option for “Military” alone. When I select one from the list, I get zero hits even though I can see at least 1 record from my original list that has the category of “Military Records,Surname”. Play around with the different options and see if you can find some hidden articles that you never would have thought to look for on their own.